An organizational cultural analysis of the effectiveness of Chinese construction enterprises

This research investigates the relationship between organizational culture and performance effectiveness both theoretically and empirically as an attempt to fill the research gap with regard to the culture studies in construction. It aims to achieve three objectives: (1) development of a theoretical framework that examines in detail the impact of organizational culture on organizational effectiveness; (2) assessing the typical organizational culture profiles of Chinese construction enterprises; and (3) testing empirically the relationship between organizational culture and effectiveness with Chinese construction industry as the research context. With the time-honored S-O-R cycle as the starting point, the OC-OE linkage framework is developed on the basis of relevant management theories that include schema theory, social learning theory and motivation theories. It is argued that organizational culture can be taken as the stimuli that influence the behaviour of the organizational employees, which, in turn, exerts impact on the organizational effectiveness outcome. Having been tested to be reliable and valid under the Chinese context in a pilot study, OCAI, as a well-recognized organizational culture assessment instrument developed by western scholars, is adopted to assess the general culture of Chinese construction enterprises. Based on individual data, Chinese construction enterprises are found to be generally characterized by hierarchy culture type. The results from clustering analysis show that there are four underlying patterns of cultural profiles among Chinese construction enterprises, among which 33% of the total enterprises(valid sample size being 66) are characterized with Cluster 3 that shows hierarchy being the dominating type and the other three types being moderate; 27% characterized with Cluster 1 that shows strong hierarchy and clan cultures but quite weak market and adhocracy cultures; 20% characterized with Cluster 5 that shows a very unbalanced culture profile with hierarchy being the only dominating type and the other three being quite weak; 12% characterized with Cluster 4 that shows market culture being the dominant type and the other 3 types being moderate; nearly 8% characterized with Cluster 2 that shows a strong but also balanced culture profile. Three sub-hypotheses derived from the theoretical framework regarding the OC-OE relationships are empirically tested against 9 self-developed OE indicators for the Chinese construction enterprises. While sub-hypothesis “1- A strong organizational culture is generally more effective than a weak culture”- and sub-hypothesis “2- Different types of organizational culture have different effectiveness domains”- are basically supported on some OE indicators, sub-hypothesis “3- A strong and contents-balanced culture is the most effective in all effectiveness domains”- are supported on almost all the OE indicators. The empirical test results show that, while organizational culture can be taken as an explainable variable of organizational effectiveness, at least to some extent, the relationships are of a very sophisticated nature. Based on such results, an organizational culture contingency theory is proposed that argues that the impact of organizational culture on effectiveness is contingent on other relevant variables, such as the organizational environment, organizational strategy and the environment and organizational size and that it is the “fitting” of organizational culture to such contingencies that leads to high organizational effectiveness. Finally, some further research topics are suggested for testing such a culture contingency theory.